The Grey Man (15 page)

Of course, I wasn't being entirely selfless. It was true that I would have been far happier to remain in the shadows and go about my business with as few people as possible knowing about it, but I'd also learned from my time back in Australia that we needed funds to do our work and to achieve that we had to hit the speaking circuit. I was grateful that I hadn't yet had to court the media, but I was being deadly serious when I told Sompop we were not interested in coverage in Thailand. Eventually I did start getting media exposure in Australia and that was good, as that is our fundraising base, but in Thailand we were operating undercover so I didn't want my face or the pictures of our operatives being splashed across the local press. In fact, I didn't want the paedophiles and pimps to have any inkling at all that the next westerner they met looking for a kid in a bar or brothel might be an undercover investigator. I explained this to Sompop.

‘Ahhh, I see,' Sompop said. He and his people had a long conversation in rapid Thai, which I had trouble following, but it seemed to be positive. ‘Okay,' he said at last, ‘I think we will be able to work together very well. Let us take this further.'

After we met with Sompop, Russell and I caught up with another Thai charity worker, Kru Ngaow (Kru is an honorific, meaning teacher), who ran a shelter at Mae Sai called Childlife; this one mostly cared for kids who'd been sent across the border from Burma by their drug-addicted parents to beg. That meeting confirmed that the problem of trafficking and associated evils had most definitely not gone away. Kru Ngaow's a Christian and he holds a regular monthly meeting with all the other Christian NGOs in the district where they share intelligence. He seemed like a good man. We agreed to work with him, too, and I told him I would arrange for our in-country guy, whom we were yet to appoint, to meet with them.

Frank Weicks, who had left IJM, began working for us in 2008 as our director of operations and did some good work liaising with a Rotary club in the northern Thai town of Fang. Having a link with a local club gave us some extra kudos when dealing with Rotary back in Australia. Frank was also instrumental in helping us get the paperwork set up to allow The Grey Man to accept tax-deductible donations in Australia through Rotary.

Unfortunately, Frank's own business providing training to police forces in south-east Asia was taking up more and more of his time and after a couple of months working for us he had to leave us to concentrate on that.

I'd realised that trying to run everything by myself, from thousands of kilometres away in Australia, was just not working. I'd probably give myself a heart attack if I kept trying. Russell agreed with me that we needed a paid full-time presence on the ground in Thailand – someone who could be our operations manager and at the same time be a repository of information and local contacts. We chatted about some possible candidates and I told Russell about Rick, the half-Thai, half-American former Special Forces guy I'd worked with at IJM.

We travelled back to Chiang Mai in August 2008 and I called Rick and set up an appointment with him in a restaurant. When we got to the place Rick already had a Mekong whisky in front of him and was leaning back in his chair and smoking. He got up and we shook hands and I introduced him to Russell. I rated Rick as a good operator, but I also knew that he had a laid-back style and liked to party when the opportunity presented. This was the side of him that Russell was seeing now, and I wasn't sure that he was making the best impression on our co-founder.

Rick had left IJM before the NGO pulled out of Thailand altogether, but his former partner Panom had been left high and dry as the Director of Operations for a rescue organisation no longer functioning in Thailand. Rick seemed quite interested in coming to work for us, but after dinner Russell told me that he wasn't convinced he was the right man for the job. I then floated the idea of Panom as a candidate and Russell said he was keen to meet him.

Even though IJM had now pulled out, Panom was apparently still on the trail of paedophiles, and looking for kids to rescue as a freelancer. I remembered Panom as quite a prickly character and a bit arrogant, but those aren't necessarily bad qualities to have when you're fighting a seemingly unending problem, often in the face of insurmountable bureaucracy and apathy. While I personally liked Rick more, Panom had plenty of runs on the board already; he had been IJM's director of operations after Frank.

Panom was in Bangkok and we were in Chiang Mai, so Russell and I organised a telephone conference with him. Russell liked Panom's straightforward style right from the start and after our conversation Russell suggested that we employ him. Panom had good contacts with the cops in Police Region 5, which covered Chiang Mai and northern Thailand, and he set up some meetings for us with them. The police seemed happy with what we were proposing and, to be honest, it was good to know that for the first time we would have some official cover and authority to do the work we'd already been doing for some time.

One of Panom's mates was a police major who, like Panom, seemed pretty gung-ho, and was keen to work with us to bust paedophiles and traffickers. He'd had some notable successes already, evidenced by press clippings that I later saw. He was a good guy, but like a lot of Thai men I've met he was very image and career-conscious. To get ahead in the Thai police it wasn't enough just to be good at your job; you had to be seen in the media as good at doing your job. One thing I noticed about Thai society in general was that it was very status-focused, and quite materialistic, which to me seemed at odds with the more austere, inward-looking messages of their Buddhist religion.

Anyway, we now had a go-getter on the payroll, in the form of Panom; we had a willing ally in the local police and it looked like we were well and truly in business, officially. At the end of our second trip I took Russell up to the border to meet Sila and the other Lahu guys, and to see the kids that we'd helped support in school. I must admit that when we got to Sila's village I was surprised to see that work on the trekking lodge was virtually complete, as I didn't think I'd given him enough money. It turned out that he'd been able to get some more funding for the lodge from employees at Nike, which has a big shoe factory in northern Thailand.

Sila had given me his word that he would put the money I'd given him to good use and I had been foolish to doubt him. The building was nicely finished and when I walked out onto the rear balcony the view of the village and hills was as spectacular as I'd remembered. There was a long dining table and benches outside and Russell and I sat with Sila, drinking hill tribe tea and eating lychees that his people were growing now that opium cultivation had been all but eradicated. It was good to see my friends again, and good to see that you could make a difference to people's lives without destroying or curbing their culture.

Sila spoke to Russell and me about the possibility of The Grey Man replicating what we had done in his village – supporting children at risk via paying their school fees – in another hill tribe village, Baan Hoy May Yom. We agreed and Sila offered to take us there to celebrate New Year's with him and the locals. It was a great adventure. When we arrived we were treated to a traditional welcoming ceremony where villagers poured water from a bottle so we could wash our hands, and then they danced for us. I felt like Lord Jim himself.

As well as our assistance with school fees, Sila proposed another good idea to help keep kids out of the hands of the traffickers. Even families that could afford to send their kids to school sometimes didn't because of another obstacle – transport. Some of the hill tribe villages are so remote that a kid might have to travel thirty kilometres or more to get to the nearest school. Sila thought that if we could help fund a school transport scheme we could reach out to even more kids and families. There was anecdotal evidence of children being accosted by traffickers while walking through remote areas, so there was an added benefit to getting on board with this.

We met with people in Baan Hoy May Yom and after some hard negotiation we settled on an amount to fund a pickup truck, a driver and fuel. After that we had a huge feast for New Year's, which continued from breakfast through to dinner, with roasted freshly slaughtered pork and all sorts of local vegetables and fruits. Everyone was drinking copious amounts of whisky and beer. I don't drink a lot so I stayed pretty much in control and when Sila announced, after midnight, that it was time to go back to his village, I offered to drive his motorcycle, with him riding on the back.

It was a pretty hair-raising trip, riding up and down hills on a narrow, badly rutted dirt road with the jungle pressing in on either side of us. A few times I nearly lost it on the corners, or swerving to miss holes in the road. The headlight on the bike didn't work and the brakes weren't too flash either. Coming down a hill I pushed on the footbrake lever and it fell off! It clattered down and was hanging off the motorcycle as we free-wheeled down the hill.
‘Holy fuuuuuuuuck, hang on!'
I yelled back to Sila.

The footbrake mechanism, dangling from the motorbike, got caught on a rock and all of a sudden we were flying arse over head into the jungle, where we hit a tree. Sila slammed into my back as a result of the sudden stop and the pair of us landed sprawling in the bush. Groaning, we picked ourselves up and then the bike, astounded that neither of us had been hurt, bar a few scratches and bruises. Amazingly, the motorcycle was still working, albeit with no brakes.

‘Maybe I drive the rest of the way, yes?' Sila said. I had to laugh. Pissed, and on a motorcycle with no brakes and now very wonky steering, Sila was still a better rider than me.

Back in Australia, in September, Russell drew up an employment contract and a statement of duties for Panom, our only paid employee. We were happy at first to give Panom a lot of autonomy – virtual free rein with just a bit of guidance from us.

For a while things went well. Panom was very effective at catching bad guys, but therein also lay the problem. Panom and his buddy ‘The Major' seemed far more interested in busting foreign paedophiles than in rescuing underage kids.

There's a term in the military known as ‘mission creep': an army goes into an operation with a set mission, but as things develop and change on the ground, so too does the mission and it expands to cover a whole range of activities – and not always in a good way. There is a risk that a force can be diverted from its primary goal, perhaps because of difficulties on the ground, or because a different course of action seems more appealing or more achievable. That's what began to happen with Panom.

I hate the way paedophiles destroy the lives of their victims through their actions, but I did not go to Thailand in the first place to catch sex tourists or local child abusers. Sure, through the course of my work I've been able to gather a lot of intelligence on paedophiles, and so too have other Grey Man operatives. We pass this information on to the authorities and, if they need us to, we sometimes help out with identification and surveillance of suspects. Sometimes, as with the British man Davenport, it's easier for another westerner to get close to a foreign paedophile and track them than it is for the police to do so. However, I had not set up a vigilante organisation with a mission to bust foreign sex offenders. I also knew from my time in so many brothels that the main abusers of children are the locals. While foreign paedophiles are significant, they still make up less than 25 per cent of the demand.

Over time, however, Panom and the Major seemed to devote a disproportionate amount of their attention to tracking and arresting paedophiles. It was frustrating, but understandable on one level. There was much more kudos to be gained in the Thai media by bagging a westerner than rescuing an underage Thai girl. The former was almost guaranteed front-page news, while the latter would be lucky to rate any media coverage at all. I wasn't interested in column centimetres in a Thai newspaper, but the Major was and so too, I suspected, was Panom. One of our people reported to us that they seemed to be competing with each other for the front page.

Another complaint I had about Panom was that it was often hard to get information out of him and he jealously guarded his contacts and his information. He would email me reports telling me he had met with a policeman, but when I asked for the name and contact details of that cop, he would stonewall me. I guess he'd been burned by IJM, but I worked hard to build his trust and to assure him that The Grey Man was here for the long haul and that it would be better for us all to share what information and intelligence we uncovered. I think I was too reasonable. After all, he worked for us and he was gathering the information and meeting the contacts on our time.

Still, there were rescues, and Panom did a good job recruiting other Thais to work for The Grey Man. Perhaps it was our fault for giving Panom too much leeway, I thought. I'd known all along he was a direct-action kind of guy who preferred kicking in doors to quietly spiriting kids to freedom.